‘Ignorance is one of the sources of poetry’, claimed Wallace Stevens: ‘One's ignorance is one's chief asset.’ Hugh MacDiarmid agreed: ‘Comprehensibility is error: Art is beyond understanding.’ Such assertions might be borne in mind when Seamus Heaney, regarding the eponymous place name of his poem ‘Broagh’, brings attention to ‘that last / gh the strangers found / difficult to manage’. Heaney may appear to be saying ‘hands off’ to non-native speakers of his vernacular. Yet most of his readers, one assumes, are ignorant of his vernacular. As such, rather than saying ‘hands off’, it might be argued that Heaney is, in fact, inducting his readers into one of the chief sources of poetry.

Irish and Scottish poets often make place names perform two basic functions. First and foremost, they can create an effect of verisimilitude, rooting a poem in the actual and making it concrete. Second, the use of regional place names can be a means of asserting the cultural and artistic validity of erstwhile marginalised places and traditions. However, Irish and Scottish critics have arguably exaggerated this tribal or identitarian element; and place names in poetry can do a lot more.

Vernacular writing infects readers' ears with irregular sound, a form of otherness or inlaid ignorance within standard language, enriching it with what MacDiarmid called an ‘inexhaustible quarry of subtle and significant sound’.